Doomed Planet

Some Like It Hotter

Tony Thomas

Blogger Ed Caryl at Germany’s NoTricksZone has discovered that the long-term cooling trend at Adelaide Airport has been “adjusted” into a significant warming. The culprit is NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which has form in producing adjusted data to reinforce the global warming narrative.

Other adjustments by GISS, and our own Bureau of Meteorology, to turn actual cooling into adjusted “warming”, have occurred at (among myriads of examples) Alice Springs, Broken Hill, Willis Island, Bourke and Adelaide. You can see some animations of the adjustments here from blogger Warwick Hughes.

Nationally, as much as two-thirds of the current official temperature rise of 0.9degC in the past century is due to BOM “adjustments”. Australia’s manipulators have plenty of company, as UK blogger Paul Homewood has demonstrated by exposing adjustment fiddles for Paraguay.

Concerning Adelaide Airport, blogger Ed Caryl writes:

“While exploring long temperature records in Australia, I discovered a particularly egregious example of temperature changing at Adelaide Airport. GISS now offers easy access to their several sets of data for each station: unadjusted (I assume this is the raw data), adjusted (I assume this is after TOBs, time of observation, and moving adjustments), adjusted after cleaning (whatever that is), and the final step, after adjustments, cleaning, and homogenization.” (TOB stands for “Time of Observation Bias”).

Homogenization is supposed to correct for urban heat island problems, but it is nearly always used to cool the past, rather than cooling the present or heating the past, the opposite of what an urban heat island correction should be.”

Figure 1: Adelaide Airport unadjusted temperature record. The top trace is the annual average summer (December, January, and February) temperatures, the middle is the annual average meteorological year, and the bottom is the average winter (June, July, and August) temperatures, all with trend lines.

“All the trends here involve cooling since the turn of the twentieth century, for over the last 100 years, particularly in the summer months. The warmest year was 1914. The warmest summer was in 1880!”

Caryl continues, “Now let us look at the ‘adjusted’ data:

Figure 2: Adelaide Airport after “adjustment”, also with trend lines.

Post-adjustment, we see warming, annually, and in all seasons. The warmest year is now 2007, though the warmest summer (just) is still 1880. But the strange thing about this adjustment is this:

Figure 3: Adjustment applied to Figure 1 to produce Figure 2.

Caryl writes, “Note that from 1880 to 1947, the adjustment is exactly minus one degree, in all months, all seasons, and all years. It is a blanket, obvious, fudge! Someone got lazy. Instead of attempting to figure out an actual time of observation or move adjustment, they simply slapped on a minus one degree change and, magically, the cooling trend went away. But they were not finished! There is still homogenization to be performed, the finishing touch!

Figure 4: Adelaide Airport after all adjustments and homogenization.

Homogenization now adds another tenth of a degree to the warming temperature trends.

These changes further cool the past and mostly leave the present unchanged. The changes are the same for all months, season, and for twenty-or-more year stretches.

Caryl continues, “I found the Australian Bureau of Meteorology description for their adjustments for Adelaide. They do not resemble the adjustments seen above. They are changes to Tmax [max temp] and Tmin [min temp], and are in both positive and negative directions.

“It should be obvious to all that these [GISS] adjustments to the raw temperature data are an attempt to hide the long-term cooling temperature trend at Adelaide. These changes to the temperature data beg us to examine all station data for similar changes. Is global warming real or just a product of pencil, pen, and computer?”

Meanwhile, there are controversies in the United States, where the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration is refusing FOI requests for the rationale for its latest and curious “pause-busting” adjustments and in the United Kingdom, where Climategate emails reveal the incompetent state of the HadCRUT global temperature data. A scholarly investigation by a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham is under way.

In New Zealand, the adjusted official record of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) shows warming at a rate equivalent to 1 C°/century since 1900, but the raw data records just 0.3 C° warming per century. NZ sceptics issued a legal challenge to NIWA’s adjusted output but the NZ High Court threw it out, with costs to be paid by the sceptics. The defeat was not on science/data grounds but because the sceptics were deemed to be lacking professional authority and expert qualifications to bring the case! NIWA failed to explain why it had adjusted the raw century-trend of 0.3degC warming to the purported 1.0 degC warming.

“Adelaide has had two airports. The first at Parafield north of the City. It was wide open plains, very dry in summer (and hotter than the City). The only business nearby was the abattoirs. It remained in use for light aircraft for many years after most traffic switched to West Beach, with increasing housing and industrial development until it was almost surrounded. The current airport at West Beach started operating in the mid-1950’s (1955 from memory). It is west of the city and not far from the beach on Gulf St. Vincent. Planes normally take off to the SW, over the bordering road (since moved closer to the beach as runway lengthened) then over open sports fields for about a kilometre, then the sea. The Gulf is fairly shallow (max. 20-22 metres) and around 90 kilometres at that point.

Adelaide get a lot of its wind from the SW, S or SE (about 70% or more) which comes from the Southern Ocean, hence cooling. These are very evident at this airport, which is open to them. Also the S & N sides of the airport used to have golf courses, watered by discharge from the nearby sewerage works.

So it isn’t surprising that there should be a cooling from before 1955 to after. Since around 1980 there has been a lot of development on the airport lands (warehousing, shopping centres, hotels, newer terminal with multi-story car parking etc.) so some warming is possible, or the adjustments might have been pulled out of a hat (or thin air).”

10 comments

ian.macdougall –9th May 2016

Tony:
As long as you concentrate your attention on trivialities, like temperature records and apparent disparities between such, you will miss the main event.
Temperatures can do as they please, but the consistently rising ocean level, due to glacier melt and/or thermal expansion of sea water, shows that the Earth is warming: no getting round it or away from it. Not even for the ostriches of the world.

I must have missed the bit of the article where Ian thinks Tony argued that there has been no global warming. But I’m reassured that Ian has no curiosity about counter-intuitive homogenisation of original temperature recordings. Everything must be OK.

ian.macdougall –9th May 2016

Tezza:

….But hot as it gets, that is not enough for warmists and those who tickle temperature records for a living. Presto! A little computer magic and a lot of “adjustments” transform cooling into the exact opposite….

Perhaps for you that is not a blunt enough summary of Tony’s argument and position on global warming. But it is for me.

Lawrie Ayres –9th May 2016

The question is why is the ocean rising and what is causing any glacial melt? Some rise can be caused by tectonic activity but how much? The seas are still expanding as they rebound from the additional land ice accumulated in the Little Ice Age as is the overall temperature. You would like to pin all on CO2 but the rapid growth in emissions were not matched by a commensurate rise in temperature so CO2 seems not to have the effect on temperature as was promulgated by Al Gore’s acolytes. You see Ian no one disputes that temperature changes or that sea level rises; it is very hard to argue against reality, but equally there are a multitude of facts overlooked by the keepers of the Green faith because they do not support the hypothesis. Likewise one is entitled to question adjustments to raw data when the adjusters are not prepared to give an explanation and are determined to withhold data that rightly is the property of the Australian people.

If the sceptics had a fraction of the funding available to the BoM for example there would be a number of legal challenges to the refusal to allow an independent audit. What is the BoM afraid of? The truth is what.

ian.macdougall –9th May 2016

The question is why is the ocean rising and what is causing any glacial melt? …tectonic activity but how much? The seas are still expanding as they rebound… … You would like to pin all on CO2 but the rapid growth in emissions were not matched by a commensurate rise in temperature….

You have ransacked the junk room of the ‘sceptics’ for anything to throw at the mainstream science and AGW/Paris agreement it endorses. My interpretation of this is that you give top priority to business-as-usual, and your attitude to the science flows entirely from that.

Warty –10th May 2016

With all due respects, Ian, you’ve almost resorted to ‘name-calling’ and haven’t really engaged with Lawrie’s comment. Personally, I’m quite open, and ignorant, about the whole climate change debate, but I was looking forward to a hard-fought rebuttal of Lawrie’s argument (which you haven’t, unfortunately).

ian.macdougall –10th May 2016

Go to my comment of May 9, 2016 at 6:13 pm (above). But OK:

The seas are still expanding as they rebound from the additional land ice accumulated in the Little Ice Age as is the overall temperature.

What are these ‘expanding seas’ of Lawrie’s made of? Liquid rubber?
I think Lawrie means isostatic rise of the continents following relief of the weight of overlying glacial ice.
Melting glaciers raise the sea level, which is why the original Tasmanians got cut off there, thousands of years ago.
However, consider the (CSIRO) present rate of sea-level rise: 3.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr.
That is ~ 3.3 metres per millennium, or around 7-8 metres since ancient times. That would have been noticeable to historians, navigators and Graeco-Roman city planners.
So it cannot have been going very long in historical terms.
Mainly CO2 -driven: starting with the Industrial Revolution and accelerating from there. I think that gives us a better fit with the facts.

ianl –11th May 2016

> Melting glaciers raise the sea level, which is why the original Tasmanians got cut off there, thousands of years ago

Same old gobbledegook, Mac

The ICE SHEETS from that glacial epoch melted to raise sea levels. You are truly geologically ignorant, aren’t you ?

I’m tempted to think you don’t regard geology as a strand of science, just like the ABC wankers.

“Global mean sea level rise for 2081-2100 will likely be in the ranges of 0.26 to 0.55 m for RCP2.6, 0.32 to 0.63 m for RCP4.5, 0.33 to 0.63 m for RCP6.0 and 0.45-0.82 m for RCP 8.5” (SPM-18).
P75

Re the BBC program Climate Change: A Horizon Guide, 27 February 2015

“The programme announced that there is an increase in the rate of sea level rise. In fact the rate of rise of sea level has broadly remained the same for the last 150 or so years at around 2 mm per year: see page 25. The reason why it is falsely claimed that there has been an “acceleration” in sea-level rise is the change in the method of measurement from tide-gauges to satellites in 1993, coupled with intercalibration errors between the successive laser-altimetry satellites, which exceed the sea-level rise they purport to measure.” –
P82

“Sea level has in fact barely risen globally, as the European ENVISAT satellite showed in its eight years of operation from 2004-2012, when sea level was rising at a rate equivalent to just 1.3 inches per century equivalent”
P143

“The ocean is warming not from above, as it would be if the lower troposphere were warming (which satellites show it is not), but from below (as the ARGO stratified measurements show quite clearly), so that Man has not been causing ocean warming or sea level rise for two decades.”
143

ian.macdougall –11th May 2016

Tony:
Thanks also.
We can’t exhaustively check every link and scrap of data we use. But I will be guided by the CU sea level team and the CSIRO (which the IPA and climate ‘sceptics’ would like to see shut down and sold orf) whose figures for rate of sea level rise are remarkably uniform but not identical. I will not give them a miss in favour of some ‘sceptical’ blogger.
I notice that Monckton is part of that push, and am curious to know what his position was on the Montreal Protocol, CFCs and the threat to the Ozone Layer. So far I have found nothing.
The vested interests behind CFCs kicked up a fuss, but they were nowhere near as vocal or strong as those behind fossil carbon. See http://www.ciesin.org/docs/003-006/003-006.html